J
EP. 001
AI for Solo Founders
WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2026
This is the first one, so let me tell you what you signed up for.
Every week I'm going to hand you the stuff that actually makes you a better solo founder. Not AI news for the sake of AI news.
The tools worth trying. The little tricks inside the tools you already use like ChatGPT and Claude. The workflows that turn the hours you put into your business into more dollars, more time back, or both.
That's the whole game now. Running a real business on your own, with AI as your first hire.
I'm genuinely excited about this one. Let's get into it.
Video Walkthrough
THIS WEEK IN AI
1
Why it matters: This is the release that matters this week. ChatGPT now has chat, Work, and Codex, which puts it dead level with Claude's chat, co-work, and code. Fable 5 has been out a few weeks and it's strong, but GPT-5.6 just dropped and in my testing it's flat out taken over. It's the most powerful model I'm using right now. If you wrote ChatGPT off, this is the week to give it another serious look.
OPENAI · 3 MIN READ
2
Why it matters: Fable 5 shipped with an end date hanging over it, like it might get pulled. As of today it's baked into every Max plan, up to 50% of your weekly usage. I'm not shocked. GPT-5.6 came out and it's that good, so instead of teasing a cutoff, Claude just folded Fable 5 into your plan for good. Competition works in your favor here.
ANTHROPIC · 2 MIN READ
Hot Take
The thing separating beginner AI users from advanced ones isn't better prompts. It's voice.
Everyone thinks a clean, structured, perfectly formatted prompt gets a better result. It's backwards.
When you type, you're unconsciously editing yourself, tidying your thoughts before they land. When you turn on voice dictation and just ramble, you dump your actual brain onto the page with no filter.
That verbal diarrhea is exactly what AI needs to hand you something great. The advanced people already figured this out. They stopped typing and started talking.
The tool I actually use for this every day is Wispr Flow. Not sponsored, I just pay for it every month because it's that good.
TOOL OF THE WEEK
SayWeave
Free to start
Voice dictation straight into a mind map. You talk, and it organizes your rambling into a visual map of your thoughts.
It's the perfect front door to everything I just said about voice. You dump the brain, it hands you back the structure, and then you pass that to your AI.
I came across it this week and it's a genuinely cool way to think out loud and actually keep the output.
Verdict: worth a try if you think better out loud than on a keyboard.
Try it →
SEEN IN THE WILD
The $30 win that says everything about AI right now
I met a founder named Mik after jiu jitsu this week who thought he was behind on AI. He's actually doing it better than most.
Mik runs an apparel business on Shopify. He told me he felt way behind on AI, like everyone else was miles ahead of him. Here's the thing though. He was doing it exactly right and didn't even know it.
He wasn't trying to rebuild his whole business with AI. He had a widget on his Shopify store costing him $29 a month, so he opened Claude, had it rebuild the component, and installed it himself. A few minutes of tinkering. Thirty bucks a month, gone.
Some people hear that and think it's small. It's not. Those little wins are the whole game in a small business, because there are a lot of them and they add up fast.
You don't need AI to take over everything. You need it to knock out the small stuff quickly. Mik gets that. Most people overthink their way right past it.
Automation of the Week
SAVES hours every week
The newsletter that writes and sends itself
01
Build a brain. I programmed a version of myself inside Claude Code, so it knows my voice, my audience, and my business. It's basically a clone.
02
Design the pieces. I took my brand style guide into Claude Design and built every component a newsletter needs, on brand and ready to reuse.
03
Let it interview me. Every week Claude Code asks me what happened, the same questions I'd answer anyway, and I just talk.
04
Ship it. From my answers it writes the issue, drops in the components, and sends the whole thing. The one you're reading came out of exactly this.
道
Want to clone yourself like this?
This whole newsletter came out of a system that's really just a clone of me doing the work.
Inside the AI Dojo, I'm walking founders through building their own, the brain, the components, the workflow, so the stuff you'd hire for gets done without the hire.
Your first hire is AI.
Join the Dojo
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